Going to Church in the Strawberry Patch

Trying to Grow Up In Spite of Myself

A Memoir by Tom Bessette

Copyright 2009 BessetteBooks

Chapter 4
Learning How to Live From Dad

After dark, at the brink of the point, mist on the river bed. It’s spring and the roar of the water rushes beneath. 
I know I have to climb down. I see the white froth of the current below and know what will happen when I reach bottom, but I know I have to go down.
My knees are weak, my legs twitch, my arms have no strength; Hollow inside, I ease over the edge.
Loose shale, the handholds crumble with my weight. I slide slowly at first, dislodging a sharp stone;
It skitters down the cliff, splatting into the whiteness below.

I lose my grip.

My father was an outdoorsman.  Not in the sense that he was a hiker, canoeist, kayaker, mountain climber, or anything like that, but rather in the sense that he was happy to be outdoors being active doing whatever he was doing.  He came to camping late in life, was in his fifties before he paddled a canoe or climbed a mountain, but he had a history of outdoor recreation that he wouldn’t have traded.

When younger, he played hockey in winter, baseball and basketball in the summer and swam whenever and wherever there was water.  By the time I was born, he had become pretty sedentary, drinking beer and watching sports on TV rather than drinking water and playing them.  Fall Saturday afternoons were college football days and I have clear memories of enjoying the annual Alabama Auburn game because the cheerleaders were featured prominently, with their exciting short skirts and brilliant smiles.  I didn’t actually follow the game although the whole family would be together hooting and hollering at the officials who, it seemed, made only bad calls.  My father yelled the loudest; he had a strong violent voice when he got passionate and he was always heard over the others.

My sisters tell stories of his active, physical lifestyle when they were younger, before I came along.  One weekend day when the families all lived in the big house on Van Ness Street in Waterford, he climbed out a third floor window, challenging the kids to try to catch him coming in another window.  He then proceeded to clamber all over the roof, climbing the peaks, crawling over dormers, hanging off ledges, and surprising them regularly by saying boo at one or another of the many windows, the kids whooping with excitement.  It is family lore that in the first years of their marriage, when he was working labor jobs, he had a gargantuan appetite.  My mother routinely made him 6 to 7 sandwiches for lunch.  She tells the story that when they got married in 1939 he was making $16 a week and she felt that if he could just keep earning that much, they would be secure and happy all their lives.  No car, living in a third floor apartment on Van Schaick Island in Cohoes, walking everywhere, it was all she ever wanted.

At one point, right after my oldest brother Pete was born, he was working at Montgomery Wards in Menands and, since it was near 8 miles south of Cohoes, he was dependent on a ride with a coworker.  The story goes that one evening his ride didn’t show up.  He either didn’t have or wouldn’t spend the money for a bus home, so he walked it, all 8 miles, without a second thought.  When he got home and up the three flights to the apartment, there was a note from my mother that she had taken the baby in a carriage to her mother’s house for dinner when her parents still lived in the house on Central Avenue where we lived later during my childhood.  So, he dutifully and cheerfully walked another mile or so up to Central Avenue.  That was the way of it, often enough.

My early adolescent years with my dad were the best for both of us.  He was working less and less and spending more time with me. He was often already at his seat at the kitchen table when I got home from school in the mid afternoon, ready for a game of Battleship or a turn on the tabletop hockey game he had set up down in the cellar. My father would get very excited when playing the hockey game.  He would squeal, laugh, and scream at the metal players twirling on their rods, flopsweat dropping from his chin, spittle foaming his mouth, face red, nearly incoherent with excitement. I was always worried that he would have a heart attack and keel over, and was constantly reminding him to calm down before he killed himself with enthusiasm. He was passionate about winning but also fine with losing, so there was never any of that sore loser stuff in our cellar.

We had walled off the rear portion of the cellar, using whatever lumber and other materials at hand to make a snug clubhouse for us kids to hang out in.  My house became the after school ‘go to’ place for my friends too, even some kids who weren’t particular friends of mine.  We had hockey, battleship, outdoor magazines, a basketball hoop in the alley out back and a host who would pretty much let us kids hang out doing nothing to our heart’s content. It was actually a great service because a lot of these kids would have been either home alone or forced to do housework for their moms, so it was all he could do to offer this refuge. I would regularly come home to a group of kids hanging out at the house, yakking with my dad, and sometimes I hardly knew them; they were all always welcomed by my dad.  Sometimes they would even acknowledge my presence after I stood there long enough.  Hi guys, nice to see you!

Our city was governed pretty much by the same Democratic Machine that ran Albany.  I only vaguely knew who Dan O’Connell and Erastus Corning were, but I was getting old enough, at 8 or 9, to overhear and comprehend neighbors and other adults starting to talk about throwing the bums out.  The newly created Citizens Party put up a full slate of candidates for the next election in 1964.  The Democrats in power scoffed at the Citizens and their pie in the sky dream and refused to take them seriously, at least at first.  Yeah, like anyone could oust them from their patronage driven comfort.

The Ballargeons and I were drawn into a campaign that started out quiet and then turned into an uproar as the season went on.  My father had been approached to run for Alderman in our ward but turned it down because it would conflict too much with the evening selling work that he didn’t want to do anyway.  He recommended Mr. Ballargeon, who actively took up the fight. 

We boys went door to door with campaign fliers and buttons and rode around in cars with loudspeakers, extolling the virtues of the Citizen candidates and the evils of the entrenched democratic machine. Soon, our campaign signs started being stolen, Mr. Ballargeons car got soaped and keyed, garbage cans were overturned, threats came over the phone and Tom and I were caught out once or twice by local toughs.  A lot of people depended on Democratic patronage jobs and favors and so vehemently opposed the Citizens coming in and upsetting the apple cart.

The Citizens in fact took the election in a landslide and proceeded to undo 40 years of bad management and criminal activity.  Barely a year after the win, Cohoes was declared an ‘All America City’ because of the vast civic improvements and responsible fiscal management instituted by the new regime. I remember the excitement of walking in the celebratory parade with my fellow campaign workers, basking in cheers of an appreciative population and feeling manly and grown up when my friends looked on with admiration from the sidelines.

The Citizens stayed in power for 12 years, just long enough for people to get acquiescent, and then the ‘New’ Democrats campaigned under a theme that basically could be translated as ‘under new management’ and regained the mayor and common council offices. Tom Ballargeon’s father, when challenged about the potential hazard of losing the election, kept saying that, “The people will look at the record and make the right choice,” thus burying his head in the sand. The reality, as I was learning already, and which is still true today, is that the ‘people’ don’t look at the record at all, but merely listen to those who yell the loudest and are most entertaining.  Imagine everyone’s surprise when it was found out that the same old party regulars were behind a few fresh faces.  Ron Mollinari was the new mayor and immediately cozied up with the Albany group again, and the city went back to its old mode of gentile deterioration.   Mollinari is now a member of the State Assembly and to this day I just don’t trust the man.

I was still young when my dad decided to gut and completely redo the upstairs bedrooms of the house.  There was no question of calling a contractor in those days, no; my dad would do all the work himself, with me as his not so able assistant.  We worked nights and weekends for a number of months, tore out the old wainscoted walls, really totally emptied out the upstairs and rebuilt it all in a new shape with two more bedrooms and a bigger bath; I have no memory of what it looked like before.  He designed a closet for every room, framed, sheet rocked, taped and finished everything.  I know I helped and I still have vestiges of the skills I learned but I honestly can’t point to any particular aspects of the project that I contributed to, other than fetching nails, holding boards and stirring paint.

What I do know was that we actually completed the project and we kids were able to move into our new fresh bedrooms and had closets in which to store our clothes, amazing!  I guess the house was pretty much a shithole when we moved in, but what do I know?

Bob and I had to share a room, being the two youngest, although I was so much younger than him that he seemed to feel cheated somehow.  I think our room was the best, we had a small single case window that looked out onto the side yard, and you could see a ways up the sidewalk and watch for friends coming over.  Even better was the rear full size window that gave access to the flat roof over the kitchen and family room, the one we called, simply, the back room. 

Bob, being older, would clamber out onto the roof with sunglasses, magazines and lotion in the summer and have his own private sunning area, the envy of all his friends.  He was nicknamed Bird because he was always falling out of trees and breaking shoulders and arms, but to my knowledge never fell off the roof, something must have been wrong.  Other than my father, I was closest, in our family, to Bob.  He was my big brother, I looked up to him and he would even sometimes talk to me, sharing a room with me and all. That said, I have no feeling that I actually knew him.  Sure I knew his friends, and would sometimes watch them in the park, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, bottles of recently drunk Royal Crown cola scattered on the ground, swearing wonderfully and playing draw poker for money.  They were as cool as could be, but dismissive of us youngsters, and only tolerant of our presence if we didn’t get too close or try to talk to them.  Bob would stand up for me if I got in trouble with a tough, but otherwise, we went our separate ways.

 I am not sure that Pete ever talked to me at all; certainly I have few memories of any conversation.  He was pretty much unapproachable.  By the time I was eight or so, he was already an adult and working and way too cool to so much as look at such a snot nosed, pain in the ass little brother.  He smoked and drank and listened to his stereo and, frankly, always looked very sad, I didn’t know why. He was like a lot of my friend’s fathers: remote, preoccupied, and not interested in interacting with kids.

Mostly, I hung out with my father, who also enjoyed getting out on the roof, and we two would often go up there to look down on the yard and throw rocks at rats in the ravine next door.  We called it the ravine but it was actually an old stream that had become an open sewer.  If you climbed down from the back yard into it, the stench was powerful and you always saw shit floating in the murky water. We were under strict orders, as kids, not to play there, so we snuck down whenever we could and, as a direct result, contracted some interesting diseases.  Once, Bob DePuis and I adventured up the ravine beyond the tracks, climbing right up through the stream, oblivious to floating shit and even dared each other to drink a sip, which we did.  We both spent a full week in bed with the fevers and were even more strictly forbidden to play in the ravine.

Back on the roof, a great sport for dad and me was spotting rats.  He had pretty much D-Con-ed them out of our cellar, but they thrived in the ravine, especially since the neighbors on the other side preferred throwing their trash off the embankments in their backyards to placing it in garbage cans and putting it out for the city trucks on Tuesday mornings.  We’d stockpile stones and have great fun potting rats. I always missed but dad could really wing them when he was on.  There was one extra large rat that he was determined to get, but the thing was wily and always managed to dodge the stone and squeak away.  One Sunday afternoon, we saw him rooting around some decaying vegetables on the other side and dad said to me in a whisper, “Mouse, go get my shotgun and two shells as fast and quietly as you can, and don’t say anything to Ma,” his name for my mother.   I quickly retrieved the gun and a handful of 12 gauge shells from his closet without being caught and delivered them to the roof.  He broke open the gun, loaded two shells, motioned me to silence and aimed.  It was a quiet day and neighbors were on the street, chatting and gossiping, Al was watering tomatoes, a baseball game was in progress in the park and Mr. Rat was rooting contentedly; I watched him expectantly.  Suddenly a loud crack/boom tore the air. People everywhere froze and spun their heads towards us, the rat exploded and spattered to a ten foot radius and my father ducked down below the roof line, barely able to contain his laughter, me collapsing next to him.  We quickly scrambled in the window and my father then ran out of the house asking “where did the shot come from, who did it, did you see”?  My mom, afraid to leave the house when people were shooting, called out the window: “Leo, be careful, there are people with guns out there,” that is until she saw me sneaking the gun back to the closet and figured out who it was that had been shooting.  The jig was up, the other shoe dropped, and we had to listen to her crab us out for 20 minutes before she ran down and we made our getaway.  Whew!

Dad was full of stories of his childhood, the adventures of doing reckless and strange things and keeping out of the reach and sway of his mother.  He and his buddies would spend full days riding barges and tugs in the Mohawk River Barge Canal, and spent other full days swimming and fishing on the dry riverbed above the falls.  But, my father was also keenly interested in the workings of nature.  One story he told over and over was about the many times that he and his cousin Ernie would catch frogs on their way to Turtle Pond on hot days.  They would choose the biggest frog they could find and one would hold it tightly while the other would find a slender reed, properly hollow.  They would insert one end of the reed into the frog’s ass and blow into the other end until the frog blew up like a balloon.  They wouldn’t blow so much as to burst it, but just enough so that its inflated body was bigger around than the reach of its legs.  They would then place it out in the sunniest part of the dirt road, it helplessly trying to reach the ground with its legs, a mini beach ball, and they would continue on to swim.  On their return, perhaps the frog had farted out the air and hopped away but more often they found it where they had left it, dried out and papery, baked by the sun, dead.  My dad taught me how to catch and pull the wings off flies, leaving them to run around frantically, hopping fruitlessly, trying to take off.  We would gather ‘Daddy Long Legs’ spiders and use matches to burn their legs off.  He never seemed mean when he did these things, and didn’t seem aware of anything wrong in showing me.  He seemed boyish sometimes, even to me when I was young.

In my youngest years, dad called me his little mouse. He even had a song about it; went something like this, “little mouse, you are my little mouse, little boy, you are my little boy, little mouse,” and the tune is burned into my brain.  He sang it to me as early as I can remember; holding me in his arms while I sucked my thumb and ‘twirled’ his ear, a time of comfort after fear or in tiredness.  As I got older, mouse seemed too degrading and I finally got him to change it to Moose, a nickname that lasted me into adulthood, though I in no way ever resembled a moose, mouse being a more apt description of my physical presence.

My father’s lexicon was filled with salty expressions, some absolutely hysterical, some completely incomprehensible.  I was introduced to them over the course of years and the neighborhood regulars were always on the lookout for a new one to laugh or puzzle over.  When someone was in a hurry, he would say that they were “Busier than a cat covering shit on a hot tin roof.”  A large amount of anything, especially attitude, was a “Shitload.” A fast car might be going “faster than whistling piss.”  If you ate something questionable, it went through your system “like shit through a goose;” hmm, are they all concerned with defecation in some way?  One early evening, Bob DePuis, the Ballargeons and Bluteaus were over, gathered around the Battleship game, enjoying the verbal freedom of our kitchen, when my mother pranced into the kitchen, ready to go out with the girls, all decked out in her best outfit, twirling around, asking “how do I look boys?” and my father, ever the romantic, said, “What are you, going out pissing with the big dogs?”  She was in too good a mood and was only able to get out an “Oh, Leo,” and happily traipsed away, leaving all of us in a paroxysm of hysterics.  I swear, when I see old friends who were there, that is always the first thing they say, almost as greeting.  I think many of us like to think that we are pissing with the big dogs.

Another big hit was my father’s rendition of a poem he claimed has been handed down in our family for generations, called ‘Pierre’s Skunk Hunt.’  He told it in the proper French Canadian accent and patois and put it over perfectly every time.  I can do it but can’t quite get the same flavor he could. You have to roll your ‘R’s, and gestures help. It goes like this:

I hunt de bear, I hunt de rat,
Sometime I hunt de cat.
Las’ week I take my ax and go
An’ hunt de skunk, ‘polecat’.

My frien’; Bill say he’s very good fur,
Same time good for eat.
So I tell my wife I get fur coat,
Same time get some meat.

I take a walk, too, tree, four mile.
I feel one awful smell.
I t’ink dat skunk he up and die,
An’ fur coat gone to hell.

Bimeby I come upon de skunk
Close up by one big tree.
I try to sneak up close to him,
I t’ink he no see me.

Bimeby I sneak up close behine.
I raise my ax on high…
Dat GODDAMN skunk, he up and ‘plunk’
Trow something in my eye!

Sacre bleu, I t’ink I blind,
Jees Chrise I canno see.
I’m runnin’ roun’ an roun’ an roun’
‘til I bunk in GODDAMN tree.

Bimeby I stoop and take my ax
An’ light out for de shack.
I t’ink about a million skunk,
dey clime upon my back.

My wife she meets me at de door,
She sicks on me de dog.
She says you no sleep in here tonight,
Go out an’ sleep with hogs.

So I try to get in hog pen,
Jees Chrise, what you t’ink?
Dose GODDAMN hog no stan’ for dat
on count of awful stink.

So I’m goin hunt de skunk no more
for his fur and meat.
Cause if his piss she smells so bad
Jees Chrise what if he sheets?

My legacy, folks!

My sister Judy got married when I was 8, and I was happy because she gave me her favorite teddy bear that she couldn’t keep anymore since married women couldn’t have them, I guess.  A year or two later, my parents had their first grandchild and now had to be called Mim and Pip after the French Canadian fashion, although I got permission to still call them Mom and Dad.  Ronnie Jr. sure cried a lot and was a funny yellow color but everybody said he was real cute, so I guess it was all OK.  I got pretty interested, him being just a baby and after a few weeks, Judy let me hold him.  I sat on the couch and she told me how to place my arms and then put him in properly, me rigid with worry.  The minute she left the room to get something, he took one look at me and started squalling as loud as I’d ever heard him, even when she was changing his diaper and stuck him with the pin.  It was obvious that I was doing something horribly wrong but I didn’t know what, only knew he was in terrible pain and this had to end fast. I started squalling myself, bellowing for her to come save her baby before I broke it; she came running in and grabbed him up and soothed him and told me he just cried like that all the time anyway and I didn’t do anything wrong.  Phew, almost charged with murder at such a young age, I dodged a bullet that time.

My father was a mighty hunter.  He didn’t bother with deer or other big game but went instead in quest of squirrels, rabbits, pheasant and above all, partridges (ruffed grouse).  In the fall, he would take me after ‘game’ after school was over; we’d usually have a few hours of daylight in October to get to one of his haunts and either sit and wait for squirrels or flush partridges out from the low branches they were roosting in.  Hunting squirrels, we’d find a spot in the woods overlooking a small hollow or valley.  We’d settle down for a wait and be as quiet as we could.  Soon, you’d hear the skittering of a squirrel scuffling through the leaves, themselves hunting acorns or pinecones.  They blended in really well but my father taught me to look for movement and soon I would see him.  My father would raise up his double barrel and draw a bead and pull the trigger.  The gun had a huge report and it bucked so that only someone of my father’s strength could keep from getting his teeth knocked out by the recoil.  I believe I was the only kid in school who ever brought squirrel sandwiches to school.  Anybody would tell you they tasted like chicken.

Partridge hunting was different in that we had to keep moving; the partridges were roosting in low tree branches as opposed to squirrels that would come out once they thought the coast was clear.  My father would often send me out on point, that is, I went ahead and a bit off to the side so as to flush the birds towards him.  We usually got one or two, so the system must have been good.  At this time, we had a dog named Scamp who we took with us.  My father, not being all that serious about things, never bothered to train the dog in how to behave.  So, when he shot a partridge, the dog would dart off towards the bird, ostensibly to retrieve it, but we’d have to rush there also to keep him from eating the thing whole, feathers and all.

We had Scamp for 5 years, about 1966 to 1971 or so.  My father, ever the practical joker, was always thinking up tricks to play on the dog.  One of our favorites was to get a shirt, hat and my father’s big reading glasses and get the dog gussied up with them, sometimes even with a scarf.  One of us would take the dog on our lap with him placed in a human like sitting position, paws on the table and tail tucked up tight, as we took pictures. I remember the camera catching the dog with this pathetic, tolerant, embarrassed look on his face.  Everyone laughed and he just sat there looking decidedly un-dog like.  God, he put up with a lot. The tricks culminated in a night of drunkenness. My mom had been having a rare glass of red wine and Scamp was begging very cutely.  Nothing would serve but my father grabbing one of our larger cereal bowls, pouring it near full with wine and placing it on the floor for Scamp to lap up, which he greedily did. He licked the bowl clean and smiled up in gratitude. In short order he started wavering, looking glassy eyed, and started sneezing repeatedly.  He lost all sense of direction and ended up tangled in the rungs of a kitchen chair, stuck and whimpering, the family speechless with laughter. My father extricated him, carried him up to my room, placed him on the musty towels where he slept and said he’d be fine in the morning.

He developed some kind of canine epilepsy and since he slept in my room, I would often awake at night to hear and see him thumping against the dresser and walls, completely insensible.  The attacks would last anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes and scared the hell out of me even after they’d been happening for a while.  The final one lasted well over ten minutes and he came out of it very confused, foaming and beady eyed; my father called the humane society and that was the end of Scamp.

Before Scamp, we had tried dog ownership with Duke.  One night, my father was working late, the rest of us were gathered in the back room worshipping the TV when we heard a tremendous thumping on the back porch.  We all went to see, and there was dad, being yanked along by a monstrous German Shepherd.  Dad had stopped at the Shelter, had seen Duke, decided we needed a dog and brought him home.  Duke was powerful and willful and I was never really sure of him, small as I was.  Mom was nervous, my sisters kept him pretty much at arms length and he became my dog.  There was no issue of teaching him to walk on a leash, we never bothered with anything like that, or training of any kind for that matter.  Just let him out when he stood at the door.

We had Duke for about a month or so when one night Mrs. Mancucci came down the other side of our street, walking her precious yippy Chihuahua when Duke was outside pillaging the neighborhood.  Blood curdling screams brought my father out on the run to find Duke pinning Mrs. Mancucci against Mr. Miller’s fence, she cradling her dog. Dad to the rescue.  He was tough and fearless and even he had a hard time of it, wrestling Duke off her and across the street and into our cellar, neighbors looking on in horror.  Dad went up the street to the Mancucci’s to talk, then came home and spent a bit of time on the phone, past my bedtime.  In the morning, Duke was still in the cellar and mom refused to let anyone go down there in case he was still mad, as in crazy.  I waited until she was occupied making breakfast and went down anyway. There was good ol’ Duke, wagging his tail at me, salivating, with a wild look in his eye; I think he was only hoping for breakfast but I beat it back up the stairs just in case.  Mom said he had to go; Dad said there might be trouble with the police if we kept him; I remembered how the police looked for any reason to lock little kids away.  I cried and screamed, but was secretly relieved, and there you have it.

Before Duke, we had cats.  We had Tinker when I was very young, I remember she was yellow and orange and had babies while we owned her.  I was allowed to see them right after they were born and handled them when no one was looking and I have no memory whatsoever of anything else concerning Tinker.  Mitchie was our next cat and she was one tough biddy.  She stood up to any dog and never backed down and was known far and wide as the cat that acted like a dog.  A mongrel up the street once tried to corner her and she lashed out with those needle claws, scarred the dog’s nose for life and chased him near three blocks down the street, he howling and wailing in pain and surprise, she caterwauling at his heels.

Mr. Buck became the dog of our lives, at least for my parents and me.  Somebody had a litter, my father found out, and after Scamp was gone, we set out to see these new puppies.  I got to pick and Buck was the one who licked my nose and showed proper interest.  It was spring of 1970 when we got him and I had just re-read The Call of the Wild for the 10th time or so, and so Buck it was.  We took him home at 7 weeks, just weaned, and immediately left for the first of our annual Forked Lake Campouts, this inaugural one to last 2 weeks.  Little Buck’s leash got tangled in every tree root and snagged in every bush he could find and he wet the inside of the tent, and usually my sleeping bag every few hours or so.  When we climbed Blue Mountain that year, my father leashed him and was summarily yanked up the mountain by this little ball of fluff and always said that he would never had made it if not for Mr. Buck.

As he grew, Bucky became the king of the neighborhood, a medium sized dog, black and brown with floppy ears and an enthusiastic manner.  Starting a year after he was grown, we started noticing a number of young dogs that looked suspiciously like him, and they would sniff each other interestedly, tails wagging, when they met.  His greetings were always enthusiastic and my father would encourage him to jump up in gladness, which he learned to do quickly and never unlearned, much as my mother tried. Once, when he was about 5 years old and we were coming home from some jaunt that he hadn’t accompanied us on, we noticed a puddle of blood where he had been sleeping.  He greeted us enthusiastically, with his usual erection hanging out and was suddenly leaving blood all over the floor.  My father investigated and found that he had somehow broken ‘himself’ in half and the outer half was hanging by a thread of tissue. Dad speculated that an encounter with a female hadn’t gone as planned.  A week later after surgery and neutering, he was home mending, sewn back whole, and temporarily chastened. 

He was also known all around the neighborhood for his epic battles with tree branches.  He would wrestle sticks that were five and six feet long, growling and ruffling his mane, chewing and shredding bark.  The neighbor kids would laugh and jeer at him and he would ignore them, intent on his destruction. He came home one night and wouldn’t eat.  He kept his mouth shut and turned his head away whenever one of us came near.  Again, dad looked him over and found that somehow he had jammed a piece of stick into his tongue, from the rear.  His tongue was impaled on the stick from the back and he couldn’t move the tongue at all.  More surgery and he survived that one too.

I have memories of Buck standing at the front of the canoe that my father was paddling, watching out for rocks, as my father would claim, ears flapping in the wind, paws on the bow, back feet on the front seat, lording it over all.  Over his life he became a mountaineer, having climbed 35 of the Adirondack 46 highest peaks with me, in addition to long distance forays along the Lake Placid Trail and trips to Forked Lake every year. 

In the first years of our camping, we never bothered to put the food away or make any plans to keep bears at bay while we slept, and many was the night when Buck would whimper to leave the tent and promptly tree a bear that was foraging the food in our campsite.  We would all gather around the tree, shining our flashlights into the branches, seeing two illuminated, nervous eyes staring back down at us, Buck as proud as can be.  We would drag him away far enough and long enough so that the bear could climb down and disappear back into the forest.

My father was the neighborhood guy who was always willing, and seemed to have time, to take a bunch of neighbor kids on outings.  These were always simple, extremely inexpensive jaunts that lasted from an afternoon to a few overnights.  With the passel of kids always hanging out in our yard or in the house, there were no shortage of takers. After supper, permissions secured, we’d jump in the car and head up to the Halfmoon area of Clifton Park.  In shorter, cooler spring and summer, we’d go to Alec Roberts’ land off Crescent Road to jump off his sand banks.  My dad would slow at their house and yell that we were going back, receiving the go ahead wave in response.  The sandbanks were about 30 feet high with about 15 feet of spilled sand drifting up against them.  We’d climb around to the top and jump off, over and over.  Petie, Nicky, Bob DuPuis, one or both the Ballargeon boys, one or all three of the Bluteau kids and various other short term hangers on would come along; we’d stuff as many as we could into his Plymouth Fury (he owned a succession of them, one after another, a new one every three years).  On hot days, the sand would cake onto you and adhere itself to any open patch of skin, and then slide into your clothing, thickening in your crotch and under your arms.  Usually, at least one of us, often me, would land wrong and spend some time crying, my father telling us to buck it up and not waste time.

Another short jaunt was the hike into Alec’s woods to have a fire.  Dad would lead the whole crew into the woods (we never had any idea where we were) and always found his favorite pine tree, a great climbing tree with low solid branches.  We’d climb around the tree, performing death defying stunts, although I always took the death defying part seriously and was usually nervous that we would somehow fail to defy it THIS time.  While we were in the tree, dad would collect dead branches and in a flash would have a roaring fire going.  He always brought some baking potatoes with him, a few beers, some Kool-Aid for us and a traditional can/bottle opener, all we needed for a feast.  He tossed the potatoes directly into the fire and heaped more branches on top and then let it burn down over the course of a half hour or so, maybe less.

By the time we were tired of the tree, assuming no broken bones or fractured skulls, the potatoes would be ready.  Dad would scratch these charred chunks out of the ashes of the fire and toss you one.  If you’ve ever experienced this, you know where the term ‘Hot Potato’ came from.  We’d juggle them in our hands for a few minutes as they cooled enough to handle, and then, in turn, we’d use the can opener to peel away half the charcoal skin, exposing the cooked potato meat within, piping hot and delicious.  Once a relative newcomer, whose mother knew we’d be baking potatoes, sent him along with a knife, fork and plate, and he was roundly, verbally thumped and had to take kidding about it for a few years after. You had to use a can opener!  He would damned well use the can opener like everybody else, dammit!  Your hands were supposed to be charcoal black, it was part of it! Jesus, don’t people know how to do anything? What napkins?

Sometimes, our jaunts would be to one of dad’s favorite hunting grounds so we could scout game for the upcoming season.  The operation required silence so we could actually see some game before our crashing through the brush scared it all on ahead.  All three Bluteau kids were on one of these jaunts that is still talked about.  Joey Bluteau was affectionately known as ‘Animal Bluteau’ for his endearing social graces; we often called him ‘Am’ for short; actually short for Aminal, which is how he said it.  ‘Am Bluteau,’ everybody knew him!

On one of these treks, we were walking slowly and easily up along the Mohawk River beyond AlCathy’s Marina on a game stalk.  My father had just finished discussing how we had to be as quiet as possible so as not to scare the game, a talk he’d given each one of us on every trip we ever made.  Well, Joey’s brothers Billy & Albert were trailing along well behind, whispering to each other.  Joey was looking back at them the whole time, eyeballing them and bumping into trees and tripping over roots so that he was making enough noise to scare a lumberjack away.  After about 5 minutes of this, Joey finally yelled at the top of his lungs, “Mr. BEESETT, Billy and Albert are whispering!”  My dad shook his head, well acquainted with Am’s perspective on the world, and we all turned back, no game spotting today.

All the Bluteau kids had a tough time pronouncing my last name, saying Beesett with a long ‘e’ rather than Bessette, rhyming with Corvette.  We wondered about this for a long time, they also said pannycakes instead of pancakes and other interesting things.  They lived in our neighborhood for at least two years before anyone got into their house to meet their parents.  Mr. Bluteau had a night custodial job and their mom stayed home in the dining room, sitting in her rocker and staring out the side window.  An old woman lived with them who was never introduced. She sat huddled in a chair in her shawl layered under blankets, mostly unseen, and never said a word in my presence. I am pretty sure she was a grandmother but she was simply never referred to in any way. After meeting them, I realized that both parents mispronounced my name the same way; I’d correct them (respectfully, of course) but they just never seemed to manage it.  They also cooked the whole group pannycakes one Saturday morning and I was never sure whether they learned pronunciation from their kids, or vice versa, or how it worked.

Fisher’s Store was our neighborhood’s Mecca. Mr. Fisher had the absolute best selection of penny candy of the 4 or 5 corner groceries in our area.  You could go in with a dime and spend 15 or 20 minutes browsing his 4 shelf display.  He would stand patiently behind his counter, discoursing on the various qualities of chocolates and what he would put in his mouth if it were him spending the dime.  The store had a three step concrete stoop out front on Congress Street which had metal bar railings on either side.  It was important to hang on these bars and perform death defying gymnastic stunts on them, especially when the beautiful Lorena Benson walked by.  She lived a door or two away from Fisher’s and was possibly the biggest reason that so many of us hung out there.  The older guys bought cold Royal Crowns from the icebox inside and gyrated around the bars, looking cool.

Fisher’s was also the unofficial, official supplier of baseball cards to the generations of Leaners players that had passed though the neighborhood, and it was a common sight to see 3 or 4 Leaners games around the side of his building on weekends or after school.  Cards were a nickel a pack and came with a stick of gum as a bonus.  Once, after earning $6 or so from some menial labor job, I decided to augment my collection by buying a whole unopened carton of cards. 120 cards for 3 bucks, wow!  It got so good to me that I went back after a short delay and bought another carton, spending the last of my money.  My father spotted me walking back home down our back alley, a crowd of kids trailing behind me, suddenly my friends, me doling out cards to the favored ones.  Dad put a stop to it and we went right on back to Fisher’s to get my money back.  The friends just melted away.

I knew then that fame was fleeting, but I wanted more of it.  I just didn’t want to put in any effort.

I didn’t understand until well into high school what my parent’s marriage was like.  My father, when I was old enough to know him, was not a real go getter when it came to work.  He had a great few years selling life insurance for Metropolitan in the early sixties and even won a cross country trip to California in sixty-four or sixty-five.  I was eight years old or so and spent the few weeks of the trip with Aunt Bert. Then the company revamped how they paid their salesmen and his income started to decline. He just couldn’t seem to make himself go out and get new sales. At eleven and twelve, I didn’t really understand finances but I know there was very little extra money and often not enough.  Lots of darned socks and patched jeans, scuffed school shoes, hash and corn for supper.

I have clear memories of mom sending me to Caradori’s Tavern on Lancaster Street to get my father to come home for supper on a pretty regular basis.  There were many weeks, even months when he basically didn’t make it home on Friday nights because he had stopped for a quick one that turned into an all evening session with the guys.  There were a few times that he drank up his entire paycheck on the way home, not meanly but stupidly.  We could always tell because he would tramp woodenly into the house, plop at the kitchen table, crack another quart bottle of Ballantine, and complain to the television set: “This stupid crap, Jesus Kee Ko, what a bunch of shit, PAIN IN MY GODDAM ASS, Christ”.  My mother would pout in silence, mostly, but occasionally she would say “Leo, you’re drunk”, then the yelling would commence.  Sue would herd me upstairs and from the landing we would see the moving shadows and hear the yelling, one voice high pitched and whining, the other lower, darker, slurred and uncaring.  Sue would be squeezing me tightly and would say “listen to what he is doing to your mother”, and I would cry, not so much because he was drunk and being bestial, but because I couldn’t reconcile this personality with the happy, fun one that I saw in the daylight.  These screaming matches invariably lasted for about twenty minutes until my mother would snuffle off to bed and he would return to Ballantine and cussing the TV. 

I don’t believe that I ever felt my father was doing anything wrong particularly, and I believe that I held my mother responsible, perhaps because she would tend to let things happen to her and not have at the ready complete proactive plans to counteract any childish behavior he might exhibit.  What plans could have dealt with these situations, apart from gathering the kids and going…where?  She didn’t work at the time, might not know how to get a good enough job to pay the bills and had her hands full with us kids as it was, the hardest job anyone could be asked to do. To all this, add the restrictions that a good Catholic upbringing brought on her: divorce unacceptable, single parenthood unthinkable, leaving her man unimaginable. At any rate, my dad would drink all or most of his pay, come home sullen and stumbling and roar if questioned. All this from my best buddy and male influence.

By the time I was in sixth or seventh grade, things were easing off a bit.  Somehow, he had stopped drinking with his buddies and he and my mother seemed to be decent friends again.  I don’t know what, if anything happened.  Maybe he just grew up a bit more, maybe he saw himself one day; it could have been anything.  He drank less, stayed home more, and both mom and dad were happier, in general.